I know your neighbor teams in Steinberg, regarding all other products than Dorico, are too hesitate to prepare compatibility works with new major system versions even though developer preview builds are available.
Developer preview builds are released for you software developers to do the compatibility preparations. It’s not a good idea to ignore these builds. Thus, I am wondering you Dorico team could be aware of such essense.
P.S.: AFAIK, macOS Sierra ditched most Snow-Leopard APIs popular among those softwares used in audio industry. Please do not hesitate on starting troubleshooting compatibility issues, because this will be a time-consuming big work for this year.
AFAIK, Dorico is developed and tested on 10.10+, so there is a big chance that it will work on the next OS X version.
However, I think that Dorico’s team should focus on stability, usability and engraving quality output rather than on following the os-trends.
Apple has become a kind of monster company, their constant OS X update is nothing but totally illogical step, I believe that Steve Jobs jumps in his grave seeing this. This ridiculous 1-year update, when OS X becomes “more nice, smarter and quicker” is completely nonsense, wasting enormous time and money.
Just making an upgrade in a complex recording studio would cost you a lot of money and time. Only because icons become flat rather than round, but they break your drivers or documents. As a long Apple user I think this is alarming.
I do hope Dorico is actively developed on the Windows platform as well…although I’ve yet to spot a screen dump from a Win machine. In music circles, Mac users may be the majority, but as a Windows only user for 20 years, I have also largely avoided most of the bugs and issues Mac users have been shouting about on the fora. (Such as VEP/Kontakt/Play/Finale HP issues). Q4 is only a few months away and with lots of coding yet to be completed, time is certainly not in abundance… Do we risk that the Windows version will be a last minute “port”, with insufficient rounds of testing…?
Trends? Any application developed for macOS El Captan, if having no deprecated Snow-Leopard APIs used, shall be fine under macOS Sierra. I tested AVID Sibelius 8.3 and it runs blazing faster comparing to its performance under El Capitan without any loss of stability. Note that this is because macOS ditched really old APIs. Such deprecated APIs could hinder the overall system stability, security and performance on recent Mac models (since 2013).